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Grace Note
I’ve been covering Project Grace for a long time, since the summer of 2017, when my colleague Michael Praats and I heard New Hanover County was exploring some more ambitious plans for the downtown library block.
At the time, the City of Wilmington was working the kinks out of its Riverplace deal, a public-private partnership aimed at turning a downtown parking deck into a mixed-use development. The project hit plenty of snags – and struck some as an out-and-out boondoggle, since it far exceeded the cost of simply building a new parking deck – but city leaders were confident it would eventually pay for itself by putting a massive new building on the downtown skyline and the city’s property tax roll. (I think history will ultimately vindicate the city, but it will take time for lingering suspicions and grievances to fade.)
It struck me and Praats as if the county was trying not just to get in on the public-private project party but to show up the city by steering a steadier course. Here, this is how you do a P3, was the vibe.
But smooth sailing was not in the cards for Project Grace.
The initial plans included four options, with the costliest public portion somewhere in the $20-million neighborhood. That iteration faded not long after, but came back in 2019, with Zimmer Development Company on board. Despite a long, hard campaign by the county, the project ran into trouble over its financing plan, which involved the county effectively giving Zimmer the land to build a new library and Cape Fear Museum and then entering a rent-to-own deal. Many — including then-State Treasurer Dale Folwell and members of the Local Government Commission (LGC) — felt the $90-million project unnecessarily enriched Zimmer on the public dime, and avoided obvious ways to develop the project more efficiently.
In 2023, Cape Fear Development took up the project. Co-founder Brian Eckel has acknowledged he took a significant gamble, and other developers told him he “needed to have his head examined” for considering Project Grace, which had been pilloried by Folwell, the LGC, historical preservationists who wanted to save the Belk building (home of the current library) and the adjacent former car dealership, environmentalists who feared what the rubble from the current library would mean for the county’s landfill, and host of other advocates who disliked the project for a wide variety of reasons. Diana Hill, first amongst equals in this group, was perhaps the loudest, most persistent, and most consistent critic.
Eckel and his team managed to navigate many of these concerns and, if he hasn’t won over every critic, he’s been able to outlast most of them. Cape Fear Development (CFD) pared back some of the excesses of Zimmer’s plan while avoiding a bargain-basement model. (I suggested that some people treated the project like it was either a Bentley or a Kia, Eckel told me, “sometimes there’s a nice Cadillac.”) And they explored ways to try and accommodate a host of other criticisms, like adaptive reuse of the Belk building, and other ways to approach the project’s layout.
This week, I took a hard-hat tour of Project Grace with Eckel and CFD partner Mike Brown. We joked a little bit about some of the trials and tribulations of Project Grace – jokes that probably would not have been as funny when it was still on life support, with millions in public and private money already dedicated to the project.
But, standing in the cylindrical space that will hold the Cape Fear Museum’s planetarium or ascending (somewhat nervously) the staircase leading to the library’s second floor, I was reminded that despite the Sturm und Drang inspired by this project – and I include some of my own reporting in that — the end result is both genuinely cool and good for the community.
I’m glad the Zimmer deal was put under a microscope — and I’m glad CFD had to work hard with Hill and other detractors to try and win them over. It shouldn’t be easy to spend tens of millions of public dollars — especially when they’re mingling with private dollars, and not always in crystal clear ways.
I suspect there are still critics of Project Grace out there, and some with legitimate criticisms of how the plans for the county’s downtown block have evolved over the last eight years. I've certainly been accused many times of being a cynic about Project Grace, of failing to 'root for' the project to succeed. I don't mind: journalists are supposed to be skeptical. We're not supposed to be cheerleaders, we leave that to the Chamber of Commerce, the trade journals, and the PR professionals. But I hope it’s not lost on people that, after all this, there will be an impressive new public space dedicated to history, and science, and reading — and there are many worse things on which your government can spend your money.
Sense and Censure
On Friday evening, a friend of mine asked me what was going on with the censure of New Hanover County school board member Tim Merrick. (Having a friend who will talk all about local news is both a neat perk and also kind of a buzzkill at parties, depending on what stories are trending.)
There’s been some good reporting on the issue this week, especially from my colleague Rachel Keith (you can find her piece here), but also from Port City Daily and WECT. But not everyone has time to read multiple stories from multiple outlets.
So, here’s the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) version I gave my friend:
Last year, after several revisions, New Hanover County Schools banned flags and banners in classrooms and elsewhere around campus, with a few exceptions (like the state and U.S. flags and other images relevant to a particular class curriculum).
A teacher who had been displaying a small Pride flag, apparently sticking out of a coffee mug, was asked to remove it from their classroom. They reached out to Merrick, who essentially said he thought the policy was hurtful but that it wasn’t worth quitting over. Merrick encouraged the teacher to be polite, and make their case, but also added they should keep their conversation private.
Somehow, Board Chair Melissa Mason found out about this. That “somehow” is a significant missing piece of the story. As I understand it, board members don’t have access to teacher emails, aside from the same public records request system that journalists and the public use – and it wasn’t that, since you can see all the past requests. It also seems unlikely that the teacher forwarded their emails to Mason willingly. So put a pin in that facet of the story.
In any case, Mason punished Merrick by removing him from the two committees he’d been assigned to at the beginning of the year.
Mason had received harsh pushback earlier this year from fellow Republicans and the New Hanover County GOP for appointing Merrick, a Democrat, to those committees in the first place. During the county GOP convention, there was an unsuccessful measure to officially condemn her actions; Mason remained defiant that she’d done nothing wrong. Notably, Merrick’s punishment, a temporary, two-month suspension, later became a moot point, since one committee was dissolved and the other restructured in a way that meant Merrick would have essentially no committee duties.
Merrick went to a committee meeting anyway — attending as a “constituent” rather than a member — and when people asked him about that, he shared some of the backstory of why he’d been suspended (without naming the teacher, as I understand it).
Still, Mason alleged what Merrick shared was a violation of teacher privacy, since it involved a potential disciplinary situation. It’s not clear if the teacher actually had been formally disciplined, but it seems clear they had been violating the flag policy.
(I’ll note that most of the teachers my colleagues and I have spoken to are extremely concerned about their privacy, with concern about retaliation not only from the administration but from the public, who they fear will search their emails or doxx them online. In this case, there’s a bit of bitter irony: having supported the ban on Pride flags, Mason’s noble defense of the privacy of a teacher hurt personally by that policy struck many as off-key, at best.)
Mason drew up a resolution to censure Merrick. She argued that Merrick forced her hand by subverting her decisions after private conversations and the initial committee suspensions. She noted she’d meted out similar punishments to her fellow Republicans, implying that censures hadn’t been necessary because they’d gotten in line with whatever her directives had been.
Then, on Friday, after a long, rowdy meeting, the censure resolution passed 5-2 along party lines. I’m not saying it was a kangaroo court, but no one was surprised by the outcome.
Merrick objected to many of the provisions of the censure resolution, including the lack of time given for him to prepare (just a few days). But he also admitted he might not have handled the situation perfectly and, at one point, apologized to Mason for flouting her authority. Judy Justice, the board’s only other Democrat, also agreed Merrick had probably made a “rookie mistake,” but said the censure movement was damaging to the board and the district.
Having patiently listened to this, my friend asked, “So, what does that mean? Like, what’s the point? Is it just political?”
Those, I had to admit, were really good questions.
The censure doesn’t remove Merrick from the board or in any other way sanction, fine, or restrict him. The committee seats he was assigned aren’t there to return to, so there’s not even the issue of extending his suspension.
Despite repeated claims that this wasn’t political — Mason and fellow Republican Pete Wildeboer both claimed it was about respect for the board’s policies and the chair position — it clearly had a political angle, beyond the party-line vote.
Mason aggravated the local Republican establishment when she named Merrick, considered by the GOP to be an “extreme liberal,” to committee seats. And she ran further afoul of the party last month when she torpodoed the AI security pilot, the brainchild of influential Republican State Senator Michal Lee (who is now the third most powerful person in the state senate). Mason has stuck to her guns, which I think is admirable, but I doubt party leaders see it that way.
Whatever her professed reasons for making a public example of Merrick, it certainly gave the board’s Republican members a chance to put aside the behind-the-scenes sniping and present a unified front. And, perhaps, it will bring Mason back into the GOP fold.
But Friday’s raucous meeting also probably does more good for Merrick than anyone. Justice compared it to her own censure in 2022.
“It's not going to have any effect, except he's now been censored. And I've been through this process before, and it actually, I've said this, it actually helped me,” she said.
If nothing else, the optics weren’t great for the board in general, which has earned a bipartisan reputation for drama and dysfunction over the years.
During the meeting, Mason struggled to control the crowd, which repeatedly disrespected her requests for order. It wasn’t quite as bad as the 2021 meeting where Democrat Nelson Beaulieu, acting chairman that evening, lost control and fled the dias, but it wasn’t exactly grace under fire, and there were at least two embarrassing moments.
The first came in an early moment of frustration where Mason told the crowd it was “a privilege to be here,” contrary to public law — and the basic spirit of government transparency — that explicitly allows the public access to government meetings. Mason later told me she was speaking specifically about those who were being disruptive but acknowledged it was a "poor choice of words" and that she fully supported the public's right to attend public meetings and was committed to transparency and civic engagement.
The second came shortly after, as the crowd continued to violate the meeting rules for orderly attendance. A visibly flustered Mason called on law enforcement to “clear the room,” only to be rebuffed by a sheriff’s deputy, who informed her that was beyond her authority and that she could only identify individual disruptors to be removed (at least two people were ultimately ejected from the meeting).
(I’ll say, attendees have the right to protest, but I’m not sure the more disrespectful protestors did themselves or Merrick any favors, and in fact Merrick himself had to hush the crowd several times.)
In the end, yes, Merrick was censured. And certainly many Republicans celebrated, although not all for the high-minded ‘rule of law’ reasons Mason laid out. Some just think Merrick is dangerously liberal, a “queer marxist activist.” Some just don’t like his pork pie hats.
But there on Friday, you had a packed room, full of people who had taken Merrick’s sartorial affectation and turned it into a symbol of solidarity. “Hats on for Tim,” was the call on social media. It’s hard to see that as a loss for him.
My friend asked what teachers make of all this. Also a good question.
Board members, including Republican David Perry, were at pains to emphasize that this was not about preventing teachers from reaching out to board members.
But certainly, the teachers I and my colleagues have spoken to are skeptical of that, to say the least.
Let’s go back to the pin we dropped above: how did Mason catch wind of Merrick’s email correspondence with a teacher? There’s an argument to be made that Merrick violated policy, I agree. But it was clear the teacher reached out in confidence, and that confidence was also violated, it seems. I have to imagine teachers will remember that for a good long time.
